Millions of media items are published on a daily basis, but only a relative handful become wildly popular. The popularity of a media item (or “media content”) can be related to how many different places it is published and how frequently it is shared and a very small percentage of the media items are designated as viral media items. A viral media item may be a media item that rapidly spreads throughout a portion of the population by being frequently shared (e.g., being posted, forwarded, marked as important or, otherwise shared by users, flagged, etc.). Extensive sharing of a media item can benefit from the so-called “network effect,” whereby a person can share a media item with several friends, each of whom can share it with several friends and so on. A media item that is widely shared and gains a high degree of popularity due to the network effect is said to have gone “viral,” and may be called a “viral media item”.